Pew head: Fringe 'outsized influence'

The president of the Pew Research Center said Thursday the group’s new poll on polarization shows that negative motivations and ideological extremes are increasingly steering the country’s political process.

Alan Murray, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said that those on the fringes are having a disproportionate political impact.

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“Even though they’re still a minority of the American public, they’re having an outsized influence on American politics,” Murray said of the left and right. “They do the voting in primaries, they do the contributions to campaigns, they’re the ones that contact members of Congress.”

The Pew survey found that the share of Americans with ideologically consistent views — either liberal or conservative — is at its highest mark in 20 years.

The poll also reported that voters have shown increasingly negative feelings toward their opposing political party. In particular, 27 percent of Democrats say the Republican Party is a threat to the nation’s well-being, and 36 percent of Republicans believe the Democratic Party is a threat to the nation’s well-being.

Murray expressed concern at the rise in influence on negative motivations, saying: “If you look at these numbers and look at the intensity of the negative feeling — a doubling of a very unfavorable view of the other party, a majority of those people who have a very unfavorable view actually think the other party is a threat to the nation — and you see these negative motivations that are really driving politics as opposed to a positive motivation.”

He noted a recent example of negative emotions driving politics: this week’s primary election in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District in which tea party favorite Dave Brat ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Murray said that voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum want compromise, for example, from the White House and congressional Republicans. But those people, he said, are less active and influential than those on the more extreme sides of the ideological spectrum.

The Pew poll surveyed 10,000 Americans, the largest political survey the company has ever done, Murray said.